The harmony of the faculties

Kant-Studien

Volumn 92, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 38-61

  Rush Jr , Fred L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33845230065     PISSN: 00228877     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1515/kant.92.1.38     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Kant and the Claims of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard, 1979), pp. 65, 96-99
2. "Reflective Judgement and Taste," Noûs 24 (March 1990): 63-78
3. For a synopsis of the German tradition in faculty psychology, see Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard, 1969), pp. 415-20
4. Kant has what Jerry Fodor would term a "horizontal" faculty psychology. Modularity of Mind (Cambridge: MIT, 1983), pp. 10-12
5. This view is advanced summarily by Lewis White Beck and in great detail by Rudolf Makkreel; aesthetic reflection is categorically governed but left empirically indeterminate. See Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1990), pp. 51-58 (in aesthetic judgment, categories are given a "reflective specification")
6. Lewis White Beck, "Did the Sage of Königsberg Have No Dreams?", in: Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven: Yale, 1978), p. 56 (mathematical categories apply in reflective judgment)
7. The idea that the categories can be "reflectively" or indeterminately specified is an interesting one, but one which lacks textual support. The idea trades upon the fact that Kant talks about the 'specification' of the categories along two dimensions. First, the categories can be considered as necessary for the unity of the "manifold of intuition in general" (B 145). I take Kant to mean by this that the categories can be considered as necessary rules for the unity of a sensible manifold, without reference to the particular forms of intuition to which that manifold would have conform (in our case, time and space). Here the categories are treated as unschematized - since schematization refers to the specification of the categories to the most universal of our forms of intuition - time. Kant even talks about synthesis in terms governed by unschematized categories - the intellectual synthesis of the second edition Deduction - synthesis that would be insensitive to what form of intuition was in place. The second way Kant talks about the categories, and synthesis according to the categories, is expressed in his doctrine of figurative synthesis (B 161). Here the categories are schematized, that is, are specified temporally - to the form of our intuition. The problem with extrapolating a sense for indeterminate specification for the categories from this picture (apart from lack of textual support) is that both intellectual and figurative synthesis determine manifolds - they just do so at different levels of abstraction. The problem with making sense of what Kant says about reflection cannot be settled by appeal to different levels of specification of the categories, the categories will always be rules for determination of objects, indeed, the very idea that the categories should apply to the manifold of intuition, yet there be the indeterminate empirical element Kant requires of aesthetic reflection, seems to misunderstand the relation between pure and empirical concepts. The correct way to think about the relation of pure (the categories) and empirical concepts - and here I follow Robert Paul Wolff and George Schrader - is that the former are construction rules for the formation of anything that can count as the latter. See Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge: Harvard, 1963), pp. 164-74
8. Schrader, "Kant's Theory of Concepts," Kant-Studien 49 (1958): 210-33. There is thus no sense to the idea that pure concepts can apply to intuition absent the deployment of determinate empirical concepts
9. Although it does seem that Kant is committed to the notion that there are simple sensa, he need not assert that there is no non-mental sensible combination (indeed, if Kant holds this view, all he does is assert it, he has no arguments for it). All that he need claim is that no such non-synthetic combination can be registered by the subject as that combination. On this point, see Dieter Henrich, "Challenger or Competitor?: On Rorty's Account of Transcendental Strategies," in: Transcendental Arguments and Science: Essays in Epistemology, (ed.) Peter Bieri, Rolf-Peter Horstmann & Lorenz Krüger (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), pp. 114-15
10. See, e.g., Lauchlan Chipman, "Kant's Categories and Their Schematism," in: Kant on Pure Reason, ed. Ralph Walker (Oxford: Oxford, 1982), pp. 100-16
11. Jonathan Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1966) §§ 35-36. The argument involves the claim, made by Chipman and Bennett, that there is no sustainable distinction between possession and use of an empirical concept for Kant. Since it is the purpose of schemata to render concepts "usable," this requires the rejection of the claim that schemata are needed for empirical concepts. Put succinctly, the argument runs as follows. Kant has an abstractionist account of the formation of empirical concepts in the traditional sense. We form empirical concepts by attending to certain shared features of objects presented in intuition as significant for grouping them together and abstract whatever different properties the objects might have as insignificant for thinking them together in this particular way. The concept whose content is comprised of a particular shared property is comprised entirely of what Kant calls "marks" (Merkmale) which are the semantic analog to the significant features. Given this account of concept formation, there should be no need for an imaginative inscription in intuition of a figure according to the concept sought to be applied just because the understanding already has at its disposal concepts whose content is empirical - comprised of marks that purportedly track real properties of things. We have criteria for empirical concept application in virtue of our having constructed those concepts in the first place. The same cannot be said, of course, for pure concepts, which we do not construct and which are not abstracted from experience. What Bennett and Chipman miss in their analysis is that any application of a concept qua rule, whether an empirival concept or a category, will require an imaginative act of configuring all the Merkmale as constituting a rule and not merely an aggregate
12. Dieter Henrich holds Darstellung to be a term specific to the schematism of empirical concepts. "Kant's Explanation of Aesthetic Judgment," in: Aesthetic Judgment and the Moral Image of the World: Studies in Kant (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 1993), pp. 47-50
13. cf. Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant, p. 56. I can locate no passages in Kant that support such a restrictive reading. Rather, Kant uses Darstellung in a more general way which would indicate its applicability to schematization of a priori concepts (among them the categories). This is a minor quibble since Kant will argue for a close connection between reflection and the processes by which empirical concepts are formed and deployed
14. The phrase sie gelten bloß uns resonates with the "Opining, Knowing, and Believing" section of the Canon of Pure Reason where Kant develops the notion of subjective validity. There Kant explains the concept of subjective validity of a judgment in virtue of the mental state of the subject making the judgment - one of what he calls holding-true (Fürwahrhalten) (A 822/B 850). Holding-true has three degrees: opining, believing and knowing. Only the last two are relevant to our concerns. Belief involves conviction that the judgment is true. Knowing involves both conviction on the part of the judge in the truth of the judgment and its truth in fact. Kant expresses this rather clumsily by saying that judgments that express knowledge are "certain for everyone." That judgments of perception correspond to what Kant describes as states of belief in the Canon is suggested by the similarity of form of "It seems to me that p" and "I believe that p." Moreover, that Kant clearly thinks that knowledge begins as mere belief and, therefore, that what is in the end objectively valid begins with mere subjective validity seems to parallel the way he takes judgments of experience to issue from those of perception. The two passages do not converge as neatly as one might like, however. The sense in which judgments of perception are only "good for" the subject is not interchangeable with Kant's conception of subjective validity - that the judgment is only true for the judge. In the Prolegomena, the sense in which a judgment of perception is only "good for me" is intimately bound up in the fact that it is a first person report of sensation. Such a judgment is only good for me because its content is limited to claims about me. But such judgments are clearly objectively valid. That the sea seems to me green is not true merely for me, it is a fact. Any denial of such a statement sincerely made would be false. So, while it is true that the fact that the sea seems green to me does not entail that it seems green to everyone, this has nothing to do with the validity of the judgment "the sea seems green to me." For a trenchant analysis see Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven: Yale, 1982), p. 151
15. See, e. g., Pierre Lachièze-Rey, L'Idealisme kantien, 3d ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1972), pp. 312-20 (The judgment of perception is a 'pseudo-judgment')
16. Lewis White Beck, "Did the Sage of Königsberg Have No Dreams?", pp. 52-54 (of special interest is R. 6315 (Ak. XVIII, 621), cited by Beck on p. 45, where Kant talks about the reach of the categories to dreams and fevers)
17. Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, pp. 151-52 (any Objekt requires the categories). For a dissenting view see Béatrice Longuenesse, "Kant et les jugements empiriques: jugements de perception et jugements d'expérience," Kant-Studien 86 (1995): 278-307
18. This is Guyer's view. Kant and the Claims of Taste, p. 86
19. My interpretation of Kant's account of perception is similar in some respects to the one proposed by Strawson in "Imagination and Perception," in: Kant on Pure Reason, (ed.) Ralph Walker (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982), pp. 82-99
20. Strawson speaks somewhat elliptically of potential instances of perceptions 'animating' present ones and does not combine the insights developed with Kant's own expression of the relation of perception to consciousness, self-consciousness or the understanding. Ralph Walker also generally recognizes that all perception for Kant is interpretative, stressing parallels with Goodman. Kant (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 128-29, 178
21. A more detailed analysis to which I am indebted is J. Michael Young, "Kant's View of Imagination," Kant-Studien 79 (1988): 140-66
22. For a sample of Descartes' treatment see Discours de la méthode in Œvres complètes, rev. ed., (ed.) Charles Adam & P. Tannery (Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964-76), VI, 58-59
23. Principes de la nature et de la grace fondés en raison §§ 4-5
24. Letter to von Tschirnhaus, Nov., 1684, in: Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed., (ed. & trans.) Leroy Loemker (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), pp. 275-76
25. Very generally, there are three sources for Kant's account of reflection in works other than the third Critique: the Amphiboly chapter in the first Critique, various of his lectures on logic and §§ 4-6 of the Anthropology. The idea of a second-order ability to inspect the basic structures of mind and then compare them in order to ascertain in what relationship they stand is set forth most expressly in the Amphiboly chapter. The idea of such an ability may seem to us odd, but its recognition was a virtual commonplace in the empirical psychology of Kant predecessors. Wolff recognized such a capacity. Psychologia empirica §§ 257-60, in: Gesammelte Werke, (ed.) Jean Ecole, H. W. Arndt, Charles Corr, et al. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1968), II.5
26. as did Locke, Essay II.i.4
27. Also relevant is Kant's discussion of reflection's role in the formation of concepts and in their analysis. On this see, e. g., Logic Blomberg (Ak. XXIV, 161)
28. Logik Pölitz (Ak. XXIV, 547)
29. Logik Donha-Wundlacken (Ak. XXIV; 737)
30. Logik Phillipi (Ak. XXIV, 424-26)
31. Wiener Logik (Ak. XXIV, 861-63)
32. Other commentators mark the distinction, but do not consider it significant. See, e. g., Donald Crawford, Kant's Aesthetic Theory (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1974), p. 75
33. Jens Kuhlenkampff, Kants Logik des ästhetischen Urteils (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1978), p. 95
34. Both Henrich ("Kant's Explanation of Aesthetic Judgment") and Christel Fricke (Kants Theorie des reinen Geschmacksurteils (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990)) seize the distinction most directly and argue for its significance, albeit in substantially different ways
35. Sarah Gibbons seems particularly confused on this issue, not only routinely talking about harmony when she means to be talking about free harmony, but also stating that in the state of harmony peculiar to aesthetic reflection, the understanding is also free. Kant's Theory of Imagination: Bridging Gaps in Judgement and Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 92. Strictly speaking of course, it is only the imagination that is in a state of free play - the understanding is free when determining manifolds of intuition under concepts. It is also important to note that the description of the faculties as in harmony is not a throw-away for Kant. Kant will also explain certain aesthetic reactions as resulting from disharmony of the understanding and the imagination, for instance, the experience of the mathematical sublime (although the experience of the sublime results in a sort of harmony between the imagination and reason)